y white, saying in an agitated voice, "It's because she hasn't
eaten a thing all day. She wouldn't touch her lunch or supper. It's been
turrible to see her."

Marise's head felt quite clear and lucid now; her consciousness as if
washed clean by its temporary absence from life. She tried to sit up and
smile at Neale and Agnes. She had never fainted away in all her life
before. She felt very apologetic and weak. And she felt herself in a
queer, literal way another person.

Neale sat down by her now and put his arm around her. His face was grave
and solicitous, but not frightened, as Agnes was. It was like Neale not
to lose his head. He said to Agnes, "Give me that cup of cocoa," and
when it came, he held it to Marise's lips. "Take a good swallow of
that," he said quietly.

Marise was amazed to find that the hot sweet smell of the cocoa aroused
in her a keen sensation of hunger. She drank eagerly, and taking in her
hand the piece of bread and butter which Neale offered to her, she began
to eat it with a child's appetite. She was not ashamed or self-conscious
in showing this before Neale. One never needed to live up to any pose
before Neale. His mere presence in the room brought you back, she
thought, to a sense of reality. Sometimes if you had been particularly
up in the air, it made you feel a little flat as she certainly did now.
But how profoundly alive it made you feel, Neale's sense of things as
they were.

The food was delicious. She ate and drank unabashedly, finding it an
exquisite sensation to feel her body once more normal, her usual home,
and not a scaring, almost hostile entity, apart from her. When she
finished, she leaned against Neale's shoulder with a long breath. For an
instant, she had no emotion but relieved, homely, bodily comfort.

"Well, for Heaven's sake!" said Neale, looking down at her.

"I know it," she said. "I'm an awful fool."

"No, you're not," he contradicted. "That's what makes me so provoked
with you now, going without eating since morning."

Agnes put in, "It's the suddenness of it that was such a shock. It takes
me just so, too, comes over me as I start to put a mouthful of food into
my mouth. I can't get it down. And you don't know how _lost_ I feel not
to have Miss Hetty here to tell me what to eat. I feel so gone!"

"You must go to bed this minute," said Neale. "I'll go right back to the
children."

He remembered suddenly. "By George, I haven't had anything to eat since
noo